Four decades into a career that also includes award-winning work in cinema, with scores for Midnight Express and American Gigolo, Moroder is still going as strong as the beat in his songs.
Among other projects this year, he collaborated with one of the biggest names in dance music, Daft Punk. The Grammy-nominated French duo invited Moroder into the studio — not to push buttons and twist knobs, but to narrate his own life.

I’m not a discotheque guy.
Sometimes, if I had a new demo I went to some discotheques to check it out — see how the reactions of the people were. But just to dance, I rarely did that.

Now, the DJ becomes a star in itself, because of the way he programs the songs with lows and then highs and then slowing it down. The big DJs, like Tiesto and Deadmau5 and all those guys, they are very, very creative.

Daft Punk. That big hit “Get Lucky” is a disco song — not only the melody and the whole concept, but we had one of the great disco guys and one of the best guitarists ever, Nile Rodgers, to play on it. So that’s great disco, but a modern disco, because it has great vocoders and synthesizers.

The trend now is to go back to more traditional composing, where you have an intro, a verse, a pre-chorus, a chorus.Avicii, with the song “Wake Me Up,” that’s more like a traditional dance song — in fact, it could be a country-and-western song. I think the music in the EDM world is going to go back to recording and composing the traditional way.